User:Gemma.ribas04/Jean-Baptiste Falcon

Jean-Baptiste Falcon is the inventor of a punch card system for the control of textile machines, which was taken over by Jacquard looms. He perfected the system with perforated tapes, introduced in 1925 by Basile Bouchon, of whom he was an assistant. The contribution consisted of using cardboard, instead of paper, interconnected and forming a chain. He also expanded the number of threads that could be processed by the machine, in 1728.

Basile Bouchon created the semi-automatic loom, which made the textile creation process more efficient and faster. In Bouchon's original machine a series of threads were passed to horizontal needles that were placed in a device called a slide. As the textile progressed, the needles  located to one side indicated which to move down into the fabric, thus creating a stitch in the paper tape. This allowed many needles to work at the same time, and to apply the same stitch to a textile each time.

Contributions
Falcon's contribution was to make the object holder able to hold a larger number of threads at once. This made the number of holes that the slide could produce also increased and the work efficiency increased.

There was an obstacle in this idea which was the loss of workers. But the innovation also required two workers to operate the machine. Because the fabric had to be supplied in a certain way and monitored to make sure the machine had no problems, it increased the number of employees operating. However, with the increase of the ropes the efficiency was lost. This is where Falcon's work was so important because he got the number of working needles to increase while the machine still worked as it should. This innovation also made it possible to work with much larger patterns and materials at the same time. As they were able to expand the number of needles, they were also able to expand the area that could be worked. This made it possible to sew much larger pieces because the extra needles extended the working area.

This was not the only innovation that Jean Baptiste Falcon added to the loom created by his mentor. Initially, the loom consisted of a perforated paper tape that allowed the fabrics to be made faster and with greater uniformity, but it had a drawback, which was the tendency to break with continuous use. That's why Falcon created a rectangular cardboard card. These cards lasted much longer, did not break, meaning there were fewer problems. The loom could run for longer periods of time without having to replace torn paper. The other advantage was that the cards could be connected together in a loop. This meant that the machine could run continuously as long as the operators supplied textile.

His innovations and improvements to the loom were quite significant. Not only did it improve the overall concept of the machine, it made it much more efficient, setting the stage for even more important improvements to come. The card reader was one of the most important of these improvements because it played an important role in the development of the fully automated loom, as well as other devices and processes that would later use punched cards to perform tasks.